Jerry Camel, however, contracted a near-fatal stomach virus while they were hiking up to see the mystical jewel-colored volcanic pools on the Indonesian island of Flores. There was no hospital on Flores, and so Jerry was helicoptered to Denpasar in Bali and then to Singapore. Matthew, who had been sneaking long pulls off the native guide’s flask of hooch, did not catch the near-fatal stomach bug. Alcohol had saved his life!

But it was killing him, too, he acknowledged as he popped open both bottles of champagne, handed one to his Thai co-ed, and drank from the other one himself. Why insist on formalities like glasses? Ace didn’t seem to mind. She chugged from her bottle. Matthew would be found dead in a hotel room not unlike this one, he was sure of it, especially with Bess now gone. He would die alone, the unintentional victim of his own hand, just like Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Keith Moon. Addictions were an occupational hazard, Max West liked to say, though Bess called this the ultimate cop-out.

Matthew rolled a joint and was freshly pleased that he had company. The rest of his band—Terry, Alfonso, the good family men that Bruce had insisted he surround himself with long ago—were on an all-day tour of Bangkok: the floating markets, the palace that held the Emerald Buddha, the temple called Wat Po with a hundred-foot-long reclining Buddha, and a famous silk merchant’s house that was filled with the finest antiques in Southeast Asia. The rest of his band tolerated a toke or two of delightful bud, but they would lynch him if they knew he was drinking.

So, Ace. Matthew smiled at her as he lit up the joint, but he suddenly didn’t have the energy for small talk—where she was from, what she was about. He wanted to know these things but couldn’t bring himself to ask. A deep-seated unhappiness. Matthew tried to imagine the unhappiness residing in him. Was it thriving somewhere in his dark recesses, growing, mushrooming? Was it really due to his father’s leaving? Matthew didn’t remember his father and never wondered about him. In his mind, his childhood had been fine; he’d been loved by his mother and doted on by his four older siblings. His adulthood had been a fantasy, every wish—material and nonmaterial—fulfilled. He wrote songs, he sang, he played the guitar. He regarded Ace, the smooth, brown suede of her skin, the silky line of her black hair, the tender, pale inside of her wrist. She was beautiful and indifferent (he appreciated the indifference more than the beauty), but Matthew knew he wouldn’t sleep with her. It was what he’d expected to do when he let her in, it was what she expected, but Matthew was all done with empty relationships and with touching beautiful girls who meant nothing to him.

A deep-seated unhappiness. Matthew let the champagne flow down his throat, stinging him, nearly choking him. While Max was in Brunei, the strangest thing had happened. Bruce had called to tell Max he would be going to Nantucket Island in August to sing for Claire Danner.

Claire Danner? Max had said.

I thought you would want to do it, Bruce said. I wasn’t wrong, was I?

No, Max said. Not wrong. Of course I want to do it.

It was weird the way things happened, the way the world worked, so bizarre and unpredictable that Max could barely handle it sober. No sooner had Bruce said the name Claire Danner than Max was suffused with tender, painful memories of himself as a teenager. And Claire. God, the two of them had been so unformed, but somehow perfect. In Matthew’s mind, Claire Danner wasn’t even a person anymore, she was an idea: hand-holding, falling asleep on the beach wrapped together in a blanket; she was his innocence, his sight, his voice. He had learned how to sing by singing to her. They hadn’t known the first thing about love, and that had been better, that had been best—they were innocent. They didn’t know when or how to hide their feelings, and so they shared everything. They were kids; they had been happy even when they were miserable. Claire Danner, Bruce said. Max hadn’t seen her in many, many moons, and yet in his mind, she was right there: her milky white skin, her red ringlets, her tiny ears like delicate shells. She had pale eyelashes, skinny wrists; her second toe was longer than her big toe. She had a silent sneeze that made Max laugh every time. She couldn’t drink beer because it made her vomit (he could attest to this), so she had to drink wine coolers. Did they even make wine coolers anymore? He’d started to believe, in the weeks since Bruce had said the words “Claire Danner,” that Claire Danner was the woman he’d known and understood best in his life. Better than either of his wives, and certainly better than Savannah. And he had left her. He had thought he had no choice: he was going to California to become a rock star, she was off to college, she was going to be an artist, a wife, a mother. She belonged to someone else now, and he had belonged to many someone elses. But there was a way—wasn’t there?—in which he would always belong to Claire Danner. Max West, like most rock stars, had built a career on the premise that we were all, in our hearts, seventeen years old.

He passed the joint to Ace. She inhaled with her eyes closed.

“And guess what?” Matthew said. “I’m going there this summer to sing for her.”

Ace tilted her head. “Where?” she said. “Who?”

“Nantucket,” he said. “Claire.”

Did he feel guilty? Yes and no. It was tricky emotional terrain, and the best thing about his love affair with Claire Danner Crispin was that before she came into his life, he had feared himself emotionally dead. The part of his life where his feelings mattered was over. It had ended, not during the months following Daphne’s accident (because those were the most emotionally turbulent months of his life), but in the months following those months, after Daphne had “recovered.” “Recovered” was not the right word, implying as it did that something lost had been found. Daphne had survived the accident, yes, but the best parts of her were gone. Her charm, her sense of humor, her devotion to him, Lock, and their daughter, Heather. Gone. These things were replaced with anger, suspicion, and a cruel frankness that left Lock, Heather, and everyone else who came into contact with Daphne breathless. Lock would lie in bed—after Daphne had told him that she married him for his money, that she stayed married to him for his money, that he was a piss-poor lover and she had faked every orgasm with him since 1988—and wonder: If the car had crashed differently, if Daphne had hit her head harder, or less hard, or at another angle, might things have turned out the opposite way? Might he have been left with a sweet and loving pacifist for a wife? Why did it happen one way and not another? The loss of the Daphne he had fallen in love with was the first blow, and this was followed by Heather’s exodus to boarding school and then to a camp in Maine. She had even spent the past Thanksgiving with the family of a friend, in Turks and Caicos.